VCT Americas is proper back.

With a 2-0 showing, LOUD LOUD Brazil Rank #1 lukxo Lucca Travaioli DaviH David Cruz Darker Sebastián Castro Cicuamia erde Roberto Lobos tkzin Enzo Zimiani loan added another patch of green to its record, sending Global Esports Global Esports Asia-Pacific Rank #3 PatMen Patrick Mendoza UdoTan Go Kyung-won (고경원) Kr1stal Savva Fedorov xavi8k Xavier Juan Autumn Kale Dunne home to make it four Americas teams in the top eight.

The series was played out on GE's Split and LOUD's Sunset. LOUD won Split 13-8 and Sunset 13-9. On both maps, extended runs by the South American squad saw the team run away with the result. An eight-round streak to end Split and a seven-round streak to start Sunset were paramount to the team closing out the win on both maps.

In-game leader Roberto "erde" Lobos was the driving force in the series, finishing with series-high marks with 46 kills and a 1.56 rating.

The series began on GE's pick of Split, which was noteworthy on its own. LOUD had banned the map nine times through Americas Stage 2, but elected to ban Ascent instead. LOUD rolled out a comp similar to what it had run previously, switching out Astra for Omen and placing lukxo on Yoru. The teams had mirror comps on Split, with GE moving UdoTan moving off of Raze and onto Neon.

Early on, it looked like GE had things figured out. The team looked sharp on its attack side, with PatMen particularly hard to stop in that half. He paced all players in the half with 14 kills and just seven deaths, leading GE to a 7-5 halftime lead. Things seemed on schedule for GE, with the team claiming the second-half pistol to threaten a clean win of its map pick. However, an eco round lost to four Classics and one Bandit derailed any momentum that GE had.

That anti-eco round was the beginning of the end for GE. A smooth run of eight straight rounds, led by a combined 27 kills from erde and lukxo, helped LOUD transform what was a tight map into a runaway win, 13-8.

Attention then turned to LOUD's pick of Sunset. The South American squad owned a 5-1 record on the map in Stage 2, while GE had some well-documented struggles on the map. The team had a 1-3 record on the map in Pacific Stage 2, and seemingly had issues with identity. Against LOUD, the team fielded its third unique comp on the map, going for a Neon-Yoru-Chamber look. Meanwhile, LOUD went with a comp similar to what the global meta on the map has evened out to, with a Sage-Chamber pairing complemented by tkzin 's Neon as the lone Duelist.

Any momentum held at the end of Split was sustained heading into Sunset. The team got off to a red-hot start: a pair of erde triple kills, a lukxo 4K, a tkzin 4K, and an assortment of multi kills. Seven straight rounds were claimed to start the map, and it was clear that GE were even winning in the fine margins. Three 1v1 clutches were converted as part of a 9-3 attack side, putting GE in danger.

GE started its attack with its third pistol of the series, converting the anti-eco this time, but struggled to follow it up. Within four rounds, LOUD had reached match point, up 12-6. GE didn't go down without a fight, clawing back three straight rounds, but ran out of gas before it could even up the score.

Darker, erde, and tkzin finished Sunset with 20 kills, mitigating a 23-kill map from PatMen to help LOUD claim one of the last two remaining playoff spots.

IGL erde was impressive with a match-high 46 kills, but Darker's performance did not go unnoticed. He had the second-highest rating of any LOUD player in the series, a proper bounce-back following the team's loss to Team Vitality Team Vitality Europe Rank #1 Jamppi Elias Olkkonen PROFEK Dawid Święć Derke Nikita Niko Sirmitev Chronicle Timofey Khromov Sayonara Ștefan Mîtcu a few days prior. PatMen had 45 kills in the loss, good enough for the highest on his team and second-highest in the series.

From the Press Room

Former GE coach and current LOUD analyst balax : "The LOUD players are already great players so all I did was help the LOUD coaching staff prep them with GE's habits and stuff. It also helps that I know their habits and them better than most. The coaching staff and players from LOUD did amazing work to fully utilize them. The biggest challenge would be that GE also should be aware of the fact that I know what they like and what they how they approach certain aspects of the game, so we worked with that as well."

LOUD head coach Romanilly on the team's Split prep: "We practice Split everyday. We have a lot of theory, we have a lot of reps on that map. We decided to ban Split in Stage 2 because all the Americas teams are really good on that map, in the first series here it was the same."

GE Platoon : "I don't think there was a single moment this entire tournament that we didn't enjoy. I think that's what's so unfortunate that we aren't able to continue. I think everybody really enjoyed every single moment we had during this entire experience."

GE xavi8k : "It took me 5 years to go Tier One, and then my first year here we qualified to all these events. So if you have a goal or a dream, like, just believe in yourself and keep on going."

Up Next

There is now one match left in the group stage, which will be followed by a few days of rest for the field before the playoffs begin.

• T1 vs. FUT Esports (Group A Decider)